Lessons ahead

Will education focus mean improvements?

As the start of a new legislative session at the state Capitol approaches, it’s usually good news that the governor and leaders of the General Assembly want to make education a primary issue.

Arkansas must never let up on improving its educational system. It simply can’t afford to lose ground. In most state-to-state comparisons, Arkansas falls somewhere in the bottom 10 states in the Union when it comes to education, whether it’s college or K-12 learning in the state’s 259 school systems (including charter schools).

So when the Northwest Arkansas delegation says changes to education will top the agenda for state lawmakers when they convene Monday, that should be celebrated. To ignore education is to fail to realize just how much ground Arkansas has to make up before its educational efforts can be deemed acceptable, much less excellent.

But as with every legislative session, it’s hard to tell whether an intense focus on education will, in the end, strengthen the state’s public education system, which ought to always be the primary concern of the state’s leaders.

“Changes” do not always mean “improvements,” and perhaps more so than in a long time, Arkansans really have little to go on to evaluate whether a new administration’s ideas for education will best be classified as one or the other.

Sarah Sanders will become governor on Tuesday after a campaign last year mostly focused on defending Arkansas from the so-called radical left agenda coming out of Washington, D.C. In her campaign, she released a plan she called Arkansas LEARNS — literacy, empowerment, accountability, readiness, networking and school safety. Her promises are outlined in general terms at https://www.sarahforgovernor.com/2022/10/18/sanders-unveilsar

What all that means remains to be seen. As the new year dawned, lawmakers told this newspaper they’re unsure what to expect in the legislative session and are waiting to see what specifically the new governor will propose.

State Sen.-elect Jim Dotson of Bentonville said he’d seen no consensus yet on what changes one could expect after lawmakers gather in Little Rock. He’s hoping for reforms like educational savings accounts, which expands the right of parents to decide how public money is spent in the education of their children.

David Whitaker, a state representative from Fayetteville, predicted an “all out blitzkrieg on public education,” pointing to Sanders’ recent appointment of Jacob Oliva to replace Johnny Key as the state’s education secretary. Oliva hails from the Florida Department of Education, where Ron DeSantis is governor.

“If you think Johnny Key is too liberal and that you need to replace him with a DeSantis guy, people have to worry about public education,” Whitaker said.

Dotson is a Republican, as is the state’s soon-to-be governor. Whitaker is a Democrat.

Key to the upcoming debate will be the meaning and extent of what Republicans refer to as “parental empowerment.” Without a doubt, parents ought to have every right and opportunity to be engaged in their child’s education. But too often these educational debates become unproductive and unnecessary clashes over social issues and whether a parent ought to be able to control what is taught not just to their own children, but to anyone.

Some political leaders use hot button terms like “indoctrination,” as though Arkansas’ corps of teachers are brainwashing children rather than educating them.

Let’s hope the efforts on education in Arkansas can stay focused on real steps toward improvement that avoid being sidetracked or derailed by drama-inducing issues that make headlines but produce little in terms of meaningful reforms.

Predicting the educational content of the approaching session is like reading tea leaves. As the generalities become specific proposals, we’ll know more. We’ll learn more about how the various interests respond — will they yield red vs. blue clashes or, perhaps more likely, rural vs. urban conflicts?

Will lawmakers push to shift more public funding toward private schools and, in turn, do lasting damage to the effort to strengthen the public schools of Arkansas? Or can a state evaluated so poorly in the realm of public education manage to do the former without doing the latter?

Will new funding schemes get the state closer to using tax dollars to support religious education?

Will teachers be viewed as classroom professionals in need of support or educational villains attempting to wedge themselves between parents and children?

Because there’s a new governor with new appointees as well as new lawmakers, how the education debates will play out is anyone’s guess. So we’ll all have to wait and see.

But it’s clear the fate of education needs to be centered in the attention of Arkansans, who will need to stay alert to changing conditions as more details come to the fore about policy proposals and funding.

Sanders has said “every child must have an opportunity of a quality education.” If that’s the driving force behind the state’s political debate when it comes to schools and education policy, perhaps 2023 can be a year the state’s children will be well-served.

Time to start paying attention again to what happens under the dome in Little Rock.